Destruction Of Models

[mikker]

I remember, when you in X-com shot at a street light, it was destroyed in the TILE you hit it. The rest was floating above. how is it foing to be in Xenocide?

[obijuan]

i agree we should include gravity (if doable) like in APOC

[Maverick]

That's a bug from the first game -- meaning it should be fixed here.

[Extralucas]

i agree we should include gravity (if doable) like in APOC

Better than in APOC. Diablo in Apoc owns those big 9 lvl building wchich have 7 columns and 1 elevator. Destroy all 7 columns and elevator. Left 2 walls (1x1 will be enough), Like this:

 

 

(remaining wall)

|

|

Wxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxxx----------nothing=destroyed any support

xxxxxxxxxxx

xxxxxxxxxW

 

Building doesn't collapse (but if you plant near each wall vortex mine it will be beautifull explosion).

 

My point is this: when you will be making gravitation, please, beg, make it better than Apoc....

[obijuan]

yes...it tried some demolishing myself and got the same idea , if you can improve that in xenocide, go for it

[Crix Dorius]

What is with Bullethole's ?!?

 

I want to see Bullethole's when I'm :uzzi: a Wall.

[obijuan]

bulletholes would be a nice addition ....interaction with objects would also make the game better

 

PD: what about elevators???? can we make those small boxes that go up and down instead of the ones in xcom???? would be far more realistic

[Breunor]

Aw, who wants a mechanical contraption with gears and cables when you can use anti-gravity magnetic fields? Seriously though, would it be still broken down into several small sections so that several units could go up at one time (like battleship's main lift), or a 'one up, bring it back down, then a second up, bring it back down...' type of device? I could see the mechanical one being used in xcom bases and city battles, but not on alien ships as it would be too 'earthling'.

 

Bulletholes could possibly be done with textures, having a second, transapent one over the original. A single texture could be made and applied over items, I don't know how that would affect performance or if it's even possible, since I'm not a programmer. Milkshape 3D lets you make a transparent material, but you only put one on at a time. So that would require making a second texture for everyone in use, I doubt that would happen. I've got about 60 textures for use on walls, I wouldn't want to go back and recreate 60 or 120 more to swap out as damage increases on a wall. But if it's easy to program into the system, I'd happily send volunteers the textures I'm using, and they can add the bullet holes. Textures with smoke/fire damage would also be good, as that could also destroy the walls. But then there's a big difference between laser pistol and autocannon damage as well, so it may be easiest to make a generic 'damaged' texture with cracks and small holes, like it's about to fall apart.

 

As I said, it sounds like a lot of time involved, but it would make the game better overall. If anybody wants to try it out, I have some textures posted here: Textures

[mikker]

Will you be able to destroy all the walls in xenocide? It would help alot when thinking about that there is kind of many bugs, like the levitating objects.

[gangsta]

adding bullet holes to the wall as in the kinds you can see through would increase the polygon count of that mesh. Most games paint bullet holes on the walls and then make them disapear with time.

[red knight]

You can "paint" holes without modifying the mesh with alpha textures (you use the texture as a opacity map)...

 

Greetings

Red Knight

[Breunor]

Is this something we need to add to the models we're making? Or is it a change to the texture itself?

[red knight]

Paint holes is a texture trick (aka Opacity Map), object destruction (like the one used in 3DMax) is a procedural technique... But both are model independent (as far as your concern is now), maybe if we want to control those explosions some spring or anything else data should be added later. So dont worry about it.

 

Greetings

Red Knight

[Fred the Goat]

I don't know much about programming, but it seems like this would be something that would be really hard to get around if you're trying to make a bullethole on the lower left of a wall realistic - i.e. you can shoot through it. What about just making it into partial cover, like a tree or tall grass?

 

I know this is kindof an old forum topic, but I'm new, so I have to make another addition - I don't think gravity should be a top priority - that was a "bug" but it was also part of the feel of the original - throw a grenade and it takes out the floor it hit and ONLY that floor - the one above floating serenely. Totally unrealistic, but I say don't fix it till you see what 1.0 looks like.

[Anglachel]

But if an alien is on the floating floor and you don't have the flying suits, there are two ways to get him down.

 

Explosives to destroy the floating floor, or

 

Wait for the alien to commit suicide by blowing himself up or walking of the edge where 5 of your men are waiting for him.

 

I think gravity should be incorperated at some point.

[Fred the Goat]

Yeah, I suppose. I guess I'd just vote for worrying about gravity after a working 1.0 is out and we see how it is without gravity. After all, gravity seems like a tough project - how far away from a support does a section of building have to be before it falls. What happens to the stuff in that section, and the stuff under it?

 

And as for the problem of the sequestered alien on the floating roof, I have to point out that you have the same problem if you shoot out the stairs.

[LordT]

After all, gravity seems like a tough project - how far away from a support does a section of building have to be before it falls.  What happens to the stuff in that section, and the stuff under it?

Actually, if the game physics is controlled through the normal formulas it's just a question about setting the gravity constant to zero and the engine does the rest. (help me here?)

[red knight]

The game is turn based so the real forces do not apply as in a realtime game. However model destruction, explosions and other eye candy stuff, can be considered as realtime because they are not tied to the turn based nature of the game so there you can apply all the common formulas.

 

Greetings

Red Knight

[revenant4]

I believe the gravity should be addressed in v.1...if it were a "BUG" in the previous XCOM's and it's not tooo difficult to fix than we should address it...plus I would love to drop the top story of a building instead of using the stairs... ...talk about making an entrance

[mikker]

this is kinda old topic

 

I love to read my own topics!

[Breunor]

And we already have the gravity system tested in a sense with apoc. We could try using that system if possible, but I don't know if it would translate very well...

[revenant4]

And we already have the gravity system tested in a sense with apoc. We could try using that system if possible, but I don't know if it would translate very well...

In Apoc did a soldier get damaged if he/she fall too far?

[Anglachel]

I am not sure, everytime a soldier of mine fell from a building high up it was because I was explosive happy and brought a section of the building down. So I don't know if they got by falling down but I do know they got hurt from chunks of buildings falling on them.

[Breunor]

If each section of wall/floor is given a fixed health, perhaps a system could be designed where falling debris does X amount of damage depending on how far it falls before hitting something. You could possibly have a chain reaction. There could also be a counter of sorts that compares how much support is left on a floor, so that if more than 50% of a floor is destroyed the remaining sections start taking damage from the pieces above. It might takes a couple rounds before enough damage accumulates to destroy the rest and send it falling down. It would be really cool to see wall sections start crumbling as the weight starts to bring the building down, and you realise you've got to get out ASAP. The last soldier doesn't have enough TUs to get out, and the building buries him...

 

To explain how the damage might work: say each wall piece has 25 health. Each piece of the building above that floor (including the roofing and flooring) would do 1 point of damage, divided between the remaining wall sections and rounded up. So say the first floor of a 3 story building had over 50% of the walls shot out of it. Say 20 pieces remained, and there are 200 pieces in the upper 2 stories. During the alien movement, each wall piece takes 10 damage per turn. During the third turn, the health is reduced to 0 and the remaining walls collapse on that floor. The rest of the building falls 1 story, and all the wall sections take damage. If they already were weak, it could cause another collapse. To determine damage to a unit, I think you'd add up all the pieces that were above it and apply that as a hit, allowing armor to reduce the effect.

[mikker]

its a great idea!

 

 

And, for safety reason, the skyskraper missions should be harder to wrack

[revenant4]

If each section of wall/floor is given a fixed health, perhaps a system could be designed where falling debris does X amount of damage depending on how far it falls before hitting something. You could possibly have a chain reaction. There could also be a counter of sorts that compares how much support is left on a floor, so that if more than 50% of a floor is destroyed the remaining sections start taking damage from the pieces above. It might takes a couple rounds before enough damage accumulates to destroy the rest and send it falling down. It would be really cool to see wall sections start crumbling as the weight starts to bring the building down, and you realise you've got to get out ASAP. The last soldier doesn't have enough TUs to get out, and the building buries him...

 

To explain how the damage might work: say each wall piece has 25 health. Each piece of the building above that floor (including the roofing and flooring) would do 1 point of damage, divided between the remaining wall sections and rounded up. So say the first floor of a 3 story building had over 50% of the walls shot out of it. Say 20 pieces remained, and there are 200 pieces in the upper 2 stories. During the alien movement, each wall piece takes 10 damage per turn. During the third turn, the health is reduced to 0 and the remaining walls collapse on that floor. The rest of the building falls 1 story, and all the wall sections take damage. If they already were weak, it could cause another collapse. To determine damage to a unit, I think you'd add up all the pieces that were above it and apply that as a hit, allowing armor to reduce the effect.

Excellent idea!!!...

[Fred the Goat]

Alright, I'm starting to get into the gravity idea. But if we do it, we should do it better than Apoc, and I'm pretty sure Apoc doesn't give soldiers fall damage. It would add a whole new tactical level to be able to shoot the floor out from under a chryssalid, and hope that they died on the way down... :crying:

[fux0r666]

If you were shooting at a coordinate occupied by a cryssalid it would hit the cryssalid.

 

I know that this game isn't going to be restricted to moving tiles.. but is it going to be tile based? It would be very difficult to destroy pieces of objects if it wasn't.

[mikker]

i......think that it will be tile based. Though, it would not be such big tiles as in UFO. It would be more like.....a soldier fills 8X8 squares....you know...

[Breunor]

My understanding is that we will make buildings using the same tile system as teh original game, to make it easier to destroy walls and floors like you could in the original. That might change, I'm not sure. But it would make sense to keep that system in place. The tiles so far are based on 1m-40in width, 2.5m-100in height. Several sample building parts are available in the art asset list for reference.

[Guest Jim69]

And AFAIK soldier movement is not limited to any grid, they move freeform with a certain number of paces per time unit. Or the other way around.

[Deimos]

Fux, most if not all of your questions have been answered. The forums are quite big and if a definite answer has been reached you'll find that it has most likely been discussed. Pleas guys to save our time on answering the same Q's over and over, read through the forums. Thanks

[Guest Jim69]

I'd say that reading through all of that text is a lot of work, I know for a fact that I haven't read it all there's far too much. I know it seems like red tape but a document describing how we are going to go about handling the battles would be a welcome addition as new members have less to read, everything is right in front of them to read rather than chasing posts around the labs and workshops.

[[[Micah]]]

I'd say that reading through all of that text is a lot of work, I know for a fact that I haven't read it all there's far too much. I know it seems like red tape but a document describing how we are going to go about handling the battles would be a welcome addition as new members have less to read, everything is right in front of them to read rather than chasing posts around the labs and workshops.

Jim, you have been here a while and you have access to all of these discussions in which decisions have been made regarding many of these issues. You're welcome to sort through the 20,000 project-related posts and create this document for the new members. The senior members await it's completion with great anticipation....

[Cpl. Facehugger]

What do you mean "a document on how we are going to go about handling battles." ?

[Guest Jim69]

Actually I do have a day off tomorrow...Whether I get round to it is a different matter

[Breunor]

Cpl, he means a summary of the various points that have been discussed and agreed upon for how the gameplay will work. Such as freeform movement, gridless battlescape layout, that kind of thing.

 

Jim, please refer to the version/idea page linked here. We can expand it to include the info you're working on, and then have the "other ideas" section for future versions. One stop shopping.

[demich]

I was thinking about colapsing buildings and i've found out that we can use something similar to Bridge Builder? there is a "pressure" grid that is used to simulate forces of gravity, weight of train and such. We can use such system to simulate realistic building colapsing. I can make a quick sketch if you want

 

http://www.bridgebuilder-game.com/

Edited September 18, 2003 by demich

[Guest Jim69]

Cpl, he means a summary of the various points that have been discussed and agreed upon for how the gameplay will work. Such as freeform movement, gridless battlescape layout, that kind of thing.

 

Jim, please refer to the version/idea page linked here. We can expand it to include the info you're working on, and then have the "other ideas" section for future versions. One stop shopping.

I was thinking about it earlier, and u r exactly right. There are two suggestions I have if I may?

 

1. It should be split between the Geoscape and Battlescape just for ease of use. Makes it much easier to look at as more and more ideas come in.

 

2. A clear link on the main site next to the FAQ linking to this document, makes it much easier for new members to see so that they don't have any excuse for missing work that has already been done.

[Guest Jim69]

Back on topic

 

Just had a thought: Why is it in XCom1 that the UFO's had some of their inner walls destroyed but the outter shell was always in tackt? Shouldn't it sometimes have holes in, or at least weapon fire scortch marks?

[Cpl. Facehugger]

It could just be an extra texture that you could use whenever the ufo was shot at right? That shouldn't be too much trouble for our extremely talented art people right?

[Guest Jim69]

Yes, the placement would be fairly random but prehaps linked to destrucion of inner partition walls.

[revenant4]

Back on topic

 

Just had a thought: Why is it in XCom1 that the UFO's had some of their inner walls destroyed but the outter shell was always in tackt? Shouldn't it sometimes have holes in, or at least weapon fire scortch marks?

I brought up this topic a few monts ago...I asked if we could place damage on the Alien ships according to where we shot it during the Geoscape chase scene...that would make the game a little more realistic and take some of those agravating moments of opening an alien door and getting shot at by 5 sectoids inside...and the shots during the Geoscape chase scene would be random

[Guest Jim69]

Sorry, never remember reading that post.

[fux0r666]

Who knows. If the gravitational field was still intact then the aliens probably wouldn't be rocked by the crash. I doubt they would feel a thing.

[Guest Jim69]

I think the ones who died in UFO were the ones closest to the power source when it exploded, which is understandable.

[Breunor]

And the interior damage in a undamaged hull was typically due to the destruction of the power source, like having a blaster bomb going off inside.

 

Jim, PM me when you've got some info to add, and I'll get the page linked to the FAQ.

[Cartesian]

With regards to damaging structures: Finite element annalysis is the computational method engineers use to determine the structural stability and damage caused to structures.

 

There is proobably a free package somewhere that we can nab.

[Guest drewid]

Whoa, hold on there Bald Eagle.

 

While realism is really cool it's got to be balanced by how much the extra effort and processor overhead adds to the gameplay experience.

 

FEA is pretty intensive computationally, and seems a bit of a sledgehammer to crack what ought to be a relatively simple nut.

 

My 2p

[Cartesian]

It has yet to be determined whhat size the elemtns need to be to minimise computation time. It could be that it is only feasible to have tiles such as found in UFO1/2/3 as the elements.

 

The toher issue is thhat the game is turn based, so if it takes 12min to figure out the damage caused by an explosion, so what? It could bring up a dialog "explosion ready" at the end of the 12min and once you click on it the effects are graphically displayed in "real time".

 

Just food for thought. Any sort of physically based damage is going to come down to solving equations and FEA is the fastest and simplest one avaliable for large n body problems.